Opinion: Governor Post-Partisan

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Maybe the reason you couldn’t feel the Republican shudder coming from Memorial Auditorium in Sacramento where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was sworn in for a second term is that it was hard to spot any Republicans. Sure, the governor himself was there, and he is said to be a Republican. Chief Justice Ronald George swore him in, and it turns out he’s a Republican. Ex-governor Pete Wilson was there.

But look at everyone else. Gray Davis, the same Democrat Schwarzenegger ousted and whose agenda he has co-opted. And former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, for heaven’s sake, was the MC. Fabian Nunez, Antonio Villaraigosa, Gavin Newsom. Democrats everywhere.

And Schwarzenegger, literally propped up by his wife, the Kennedy clan’s Maria Shriver, made a pitch for a new era of post-partisanship by quoting President Kennedy’s famous American University speech about peace and disarmament. Even the U.S. and the Soviet Union can get along, Kennedy said, since after all: ‘We all breathe the same air.’ The late president’s nephew (by marriage) used the same line to urge peace between Democrats and Republicans. ‘We don’t need Republican clean air or Democratic clean air. We all breathe the same air.’

Overblown? Maybe a tad. But it was a good speech. ‘Centrist does not mean weak,’ he said. ‘It means well-balanced and well-grounded.... America’s political parties should return to the center...where the people are.’

The governor described a creative, vigorous and nonpartisan - or at least bipartisan - California. That’s not just shrewd politics, but very much in keeping with the state’s history of playing with cross-filing, open primaries and the like. Democrat Pat Brown is often cited as the governor of optimistic and growth-oriented California, but the tracks were laid before him by centrist Republicans Earl Warren and Goodwin Knight.

It remains to be seen how the distinctly right-leaning Republicans in the Legislature feel about all this centrist peace-making.